Secret Societies
Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale
- part 1 of 2
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography Chapter -VII- Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale.
``Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths,
that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should
set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled
to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up
again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle
which their fathers began....''@s1
-- Abraham Lincoln --
Honeymoon
The U.S. Navy delivered George Bush back home for good on
Christmas Eve, 1944; the war in the Pacific raged on over the next half year,
with Allied forces taking Southeast Asia, the Netherlands East Indies
(Indonesia), and islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Barbara Pierce quit Smith College in her sophomore year to marry
George. Prescott and Mother Bush gave a splendid prenuptial dinner at the
Greenwich Field Club. The wedding took place January 6, 1945, in the Rye, New
York Presbyterian Church, as the U.S. Third Fleet bombarded the main Philippine
island of Luzon in preparation for invasion. Afterwards there was a glamorous
reception for 300 at Appawamis Country Club. The newlyweds honeymooned at The
Cloisters, a five-star hotel on Sea Island, Georgia, with swimming, tennis and
golf.
George's next assignment was to train pilots at Norfolk, Virginia
Naval Air Station. ``George's duty ... was light. As for other young marrieds,
whose husbands were between warzone tours, this was kind of an extended (and
paid) honeymoon.''@s2
Japan surrendered in August. That fall, George and Barbara Bush
moved to New Haven where Bush entered Yale University. He and Barbara moved into
an apartment at 37 Hillhouse Avenue, across the street from Yale President
Charles Seymour.
College life was good to George, what he saw of it. A college
career usually occupies four years. But we know that George Bush is a rapidly
moving man. Thus he was pleased with the special arrangement made for veterans,
by which Yale allowed him to get his degree after attending classes for only two
and a half years.
Bush and his friends remember it all fondly, as representatives of
the Fashionable Set: ``[M]embers of [Bush's] class have since sighed with
nostalgia for those days of the late 1940s.... Trolley cars still rumbled along
the New Haven streets. On autumn afternoons they would be crowded with students
going out to football games at the Yale Bowl, scattering pennies along the way
and shouting `scramble' to the street kids diving for them''[emphasis added].@s3
In 1947, Barbara gave birth to George W. Bush, the President's
namesake. By the time of his 1948 graduation, he had been elected to Phi Beta
Kappa, an honor traditionally associated with academic achievement. A great deal
is known about George Bush's career at Yale, except the part about books and
studies. Unfortunately for those who would wish to consider his intellectual
accomplishment, everything about that has been sealed shut and is top secret.
The Yale administration says they have turned over to the FBI custody of all of
Bush's academic records, allegedly because the FBI needs such access to check
the resume@eacute; of important office holders.
From all available testimony, his mental life before college was
anything but outstanding. His campaign literature claims that, as a veteran,
Bush was ``serious'' at Yale. But we cannot check exactly how he achieved
election to Phi Beta Kappa, in his abbreviated college experience. Without top
secret clearance, we cannot consult his test results, read his essays, or learn
much about his performance in class. We know that his father was a trustee of
the university, in charge of ``developmental'' fundraising. And his family
friends were in control of the U.S. secret services.
A great deal is known, however, about George Bush's status at
Yale. His fellow student John H. Chafee, later a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island
and Secretary of the Navy, declared: ``We didn't see much of him because he was
married, but I guess my first impression was that he was--and I don't mean this
in a derogatory fashion--in the inner set, the movers and shakers, the
establishment. I don't mean he put on airs or anything, but ... just everybody
knew him.''
Chafee, like Bush, and Dan Quayle, was in the important national
fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE or the ``Dekes''). But Chafee says, ``I
never remember seeing him there. He wasn't one to hang around with the
fellows.''@s4
The Tomb
George Bush, in fact, passed his most important days and nights at
Yale in the strange companionship of the senior-year Skull and Bones Society.@s5
Out of those few who were chosen for Bones membership, George was
the last one to be notified of his selection--this honor is traditionally
reserved for the highest of the high and mighty.
His father, Prescott Bush, several other relatives and partners,
and Roland and Averell Harriman, who sponsored the Bush family, were also
members of this secret society.
The undoubted political and financial power associated with Skull
and Bones has given rise to many popular questions about the nature and origin
of the group. Its members have fed the mystery with false leads and silly
speculations.
The order was incorporated in 1856 under the name ``Russell Trust
Association.'' By special act of the state legislature in 1943, its trustees are
exempted from the normal requirement of filing corporate reports with the
Connecticut Secretary of State.
As of 1978, all business of the Russell Trust was handled by its
lone trustee, Brown Brothers Harriman partner John B. Madden, Jr. Madden started
with Brown Brothers Harriman in 1946, under senior partner Prescott Bush, George
Bush's father.
Each year, Skull and Bones members select (``tap'') 15 third-year
Yale students to replace them in the senior group the following year. Graduating
members are given a sizeable cash bonus to help them get started in life. Older
graduate members, the so-called ``Patriarchs,'' give special backing in
business, politics, espionage and legal careers to graduate Bonesmen who exhibit
talent or usefulness.
The home of Skull and Bones on the Yale campus is a stone building
resembling a mausoleum, and known as ``the Tomb.'' Initiations take place on
Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River (an island owned by the Russell Trust
Association), with regular reunions on Deer Island and at Yale. Initiation rites
reportedly include strenuous and traumatic activities of the new member, while
immersed naked in mud, and in a coffin. More important is the ``sexual
autobiography'': The initiate tells the Order all the sex secrets of his young
life. Weakened mental defenses against manipulation, and the blackmail potential
of such information, have obvious permanent uses in enforcing loyalty among
members.
The loyalty is intense. One of Bush's former teachers, whose own
father was a Skull and Bones member, told our interviewer that his father used
to stab his little Skull and Bones pin into his skin to keep it in place when he
took a bath.
Members continue throughout their lives to unburden themselves on
their psycho-sexual thoughts to their Bones Brothers, even if they are no longer
sitting in a coffin. This has been the case with President George Bush, for whom
these ties are reported to have a deep personal meaning. Beyond the
psychological manipulation associated with freemasonic mummery, there are very
solid political reasons for Bush's strong identification with this cult.
Observers of Skull and Bones, apologists and critics alike, have
accepted various deceptive notions about the order. There are two outstanding,
among these falsehoods:
1) that it is essentially an American group, an assembly of
wealthy, elite ``patriots''; it is in fact, an agency for British Empire
penetration and subversion of the American republic; and
2) that it is somehow the unique center of conspiratorial control
over the United States. This misconception is certainly understandable, given
the rather astonishing number of powerful, historically important and
grotesquely anti-human individuals, who have come out of Skull and Bones. But
there are in fact congruent organizations at other Ivy League colleges, which
reflect, as does Skull and Bones, the over-arching oligarchical power of several
heavily intermarried financier families.
The mistaken, speculative notions may be corrected by examining
the history of Skull and Bones, viewed within the reality of the American
Eastern Establishment.
Skull and Bones--the Russell Trust Association--was first
established among the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was
William Huntington Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The Russell family was
the master of incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal
organization of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium
syndicate.
There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion
against, freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in
particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John Quincy
Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerful
international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic
republic.
But the Russells were protected as part of the
multiply-intermarried grouping of families then ruling Connecticut. The
blood-proud members of the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day,
Alsop and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro-British party within the
state. Many of their sons would be among the members chosen for the Skull and
Bones Society over the years.
The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire,
and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic.
Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H.,
established Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from
Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the
armed protection of the British Empire.
The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the
syndicate created by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an
aggregation of the self-styled ``blue bloods'' or Brahmins of Boston's north
shore. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean
slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and
Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins opium
syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By the
1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut
the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge,
Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low)
smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices.
** Certain of the prominent Boston opium families, such as Cabot
and Weld, did not affiliate directly with Russell, Connecticut and Yale, but
were identified instead with Harvard.
John Quincy Adams and other patriots had fought these men for a
quarter century by the time the Russell Trust Association was set up with its
open pirate emblem--Skull and Bones.
With British ties of family, shipping and merchant banking, the
old New England Tories had continued their hostility to American independence
after the Revolutionary War of 1775-83. These pretended conservative patriots
proclaimed Thomas Jefferson's 1801 presidential inauguration ``radical
usurpation.''
The Massachusetts Tories (``Essex Junto'') joined with Vice
President Aaron Burr, Jr. (a member of the Connecticut Edwards and Pierpont
families) and Burr's cousin and law partner Theodore Dwight, in political moves
designed to break up the United States and return it to British allegiance.
The U.S. nationalist leader, former Treasury Secretary Alexander
Hamilton, exposed the plan in 1804. Burr shot him to death in a duel, then led a
famous abortive conspiracy to form a new empire in the Southwest, with territory
to be torn from the U.S.A. and Spanish Mexico. For the ``blue bloods,'' the
romantic figure of Aaron Burr was ever afterwards the symbol of British feudal
revenge against the American republic.
The Connecticut Tory families hosted the infamous Hartford
Convention in 1815, toward the end of the second war between the U.S. and
Britain (the War of 1812). Their secessionist propaganda was rendered impotent
by America's defensive military victory. This faction then retired from the open
political arena, pursuing instead entirely private and covert alliances with the
British Empire. The incestuously intermarried Massachusetts and Connecticut
families associated themselves with the British East India Company in the
criminal opium traffic into China. These families made increased profits as
partners and surrogates for the British during the bloody 1839-42 Opium War, the
race war of British forces against Chinese defenders.
Samuel and William Huntington Russell were quiet, wary builders of
their faction's power. An intimate colleague of opium gangster Samuel Russell
wrote this about him:
While he lived, no friend of his would venture to mention his name
in print. While in China, he lived for about twenty-five years almost as a
hermit, hardly known outside of his factory [the Canton warehouse compound]
except by the chosen few who enjoyed his intimacy, and by his good friend, Hoqua
[Chinese security director for the British East India Company], but studying
commerce in its broadest sense, as well as its minutest details. Returning home
with well-earned wealth he lived hospitably in the midst of his family, and a
small circle of intimates. Scorning words and pretensions from the bottom of his
heart, he was the truest and staunchest of friends; hating notoriety, he could
always be absolutely counted on for every good work which did not involve
publicity.
The Russells' Skull and Bones Society was the most important of
their domestic projects ``which did not involve publicity.''
A police-blotter type review of Russell's organization will show
why the secret order, though powerful, was not the unique organ of
``conspiracy'' for the U.S. Eastern Establishment. The following gentlemen were
among Russells' partners:
Augustine Heard (1785-1868): ship captain and pioneer U.S. opium
smuggler. John Cleve Green (1800-75): married to Sarah Griswold; gave a fortune
in opium profits to Princeton University, financing three Princeton buildings
and four professorships; trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary for 25
years. Abiel Abbott Low (1811-93): his opium fortune financed the construction
of the Columbia University New York City campus; father of Columbia's president
Seth Low. John Murray Forbes (1813-98): his opium millions financed the career
of author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who married Forbes's daughter, and bankrolled the
establishment of the Bell Telephone Company, whose first president was Forbes's
son. Joseph Coolidge: his Augustine Heard agency got $10 million yearly as
surrogates for the Scottish dope-runners Jardine Matheson during the fighting in
China; his son organized the United Fruit Company; his grandson, Archibald Cary
Coolidge, was the founding executive officer of the Anglo-Americans' Council on
Foreign Relations. Warren Delano, Jr.: chief of Russell and Co. in Canton;
grandfather of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Russell Sturgis: his
grandson by the same name was chairman of the Baring Bank in England, financiers
of the Far East opium trade. Such persons as John C. Green and A.A. Low, whose
names adorn various buildings at Princeton and Columbia Universities, made
little attempt to hide the criminal origin of their influential money. Similarly
with the Cabots, the Higginsons and the Welds for Harvard. The secret groups at
other colleges are analogous and closely related to Yale's Skull and Bones.
Princeton has its ``eating clubs,'' especially Ivy Club and
Cottage Club, whose oligarchical tradition runs from Jonathan Edwards and Aaron
Burr through the Dulles brothers. At Harvard there is the ultra-blue-blooded
Porcelian (known also as the Porc or Pig club); Theodore Roosevelt bragged to
the German Kaiser of his membership there; Franklin Roosevelt was a member of
the slightly ``lower'' Fly Club.
A few of the early initiates in Skull and Bones went on to careers
in obvious defiance of the order's oligarchical character; two such were the
scientists Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (Skull and Bones 1837), and William Chauvenet
(Skull and Bones 1840). This reflects the continued importance of republican
factions at Yale, Harvard and other colleges during the middle three decades of
the nineteenth century. Silliman and Chauvenet became enemies of everything
Skull and Bones stood for, while the Yale secret group rapidly conformed to the
Russells' expectations.
Yale was the northern college favored by southern slaveowning
would-be aristocrats. Among Yale's southern students were John C. Calhoun, later
the famous South Carolina defender of slavery against nationalism, and Judah P.
Benjamin, later Secretary of State for the slaveowners' Confederacy.
Young South Carolinian Joseph Heatly Dulles, whose family bought
their slaves with the money from contract-security work for the British
conquerors in India, was in a previous secret Yale group, the ``Society of
Brothers in Unity.'' At Yale Dulles worked with the Northern secessionists and
attached himself to Daniel Lord; their two families clove together in the
fashion of a gang. The Lords became powerful Anglo-American Wall Street lawyers,
and J.H. Dulles's grandson was the father of Allen Dulles and John Foster
Dulles.
In 1832-33 Skull and Bones was launched under the Russell pirate
flag.
Among the early initiates of the order were Henry Rootes Jackson
(S&B 1839), a leader of the 1861 Georgia Secession Convention and post-Civil
War president of the Georgia Historical Society (thus the false accounts of the
``good old slavery days'' and the ``bad northern invaders''); John Perkins, Jr.
(S&B 1840), chairman of the 1861 Louisiana Secession Convention, who fled
abroad for 13 years after the Civil War; and William Taylor Sullivan Barry
(S&B 1841), a national leader of the secessionist wing of the Democratic
Party during the 1850s, and chairman of the 1861 Mississippi Secession
Convention.
Alphonso Taft was a Bonesman alongside William H. Russell in the
Class of 1833. As U.S. Attorney General in 1876-77, Alphonso Taft helped
organize the backroom settlement of the deadlocked 1876 presidential election.
The bargain gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency (1877-81) and withdrew the
U.S. troops from the South, where they had been enforcing blacks' rights.
Alphonso's son, William Howard Taft (S&B 1878), was U.S.
President from 1909 to 1913. President Taft's son, Robert Alphonso Taft (S&B
1910), was a leading U.S. Senator after World War II; his family's Anglo-Saxon
racial/ancestral preoccupation was the disease which crippled Robert Taft's
leadership of American nationalist ``conservatives.''
(end of part 1)
